UPPER DARBY TWP., Pa. – An Upper Darby restaurant is the latest victim in a growing crime trend of stolen used cooking oil.
What we know:
Surveillance video shows two suspects pulling up to the rear entrance to Wilson’s Secret Sauce Barbecue on Township Line Road early Saturday morning.
“It was a regular padlock. They came up with bolt cutters and they popped this” describes owner Steve Wilson, who was prepping for the day inside his restaurant about 7 a.m. when the thieves rolled up to the rear of the restaurant in a rented Home Depot truck.
The pair was seen using a green hose to siphon dozens of gallons of used cooking oil out of the locked tank and into the back of the truck.
Four minutes later the video shows the pair driving away.
They suck it all out, they clean the tank out and they take it back to recycle it,” said Wilson, who explains many restaurant owners are paid by recyclers to haul away their used oil.
Wilson says he’s paid about 29 cents a gallon.
But once the oil is refined into biofuel, it can be re-sold by recyclers for as much as 3 to 6 dollars a gallon.
What they’re saying:
“Most people out have no idea this is a thing. I say stealing used cooking oil and they look at me like I have two heads.” said Jeff Yasinski, the owner of Trenton-based D and W Alternative Energy.
His company collects and recycles dirty cooking oil from many regional restaurants use it in their deep fryers. He says the problem of cooking oil theft is growing so fast his company created a website database that tracks all of the reported theft cases from Delaware to New York.
“This is a not only a daily occurrence, it’s multiple times a day occurrence. We are one of the bigger independents in New Jersey and we lose 10’s of thousands of dollars every week,” said Yasinski.
Wilson says he’s only out a couple of hundred bucks. But he also knows he’s not alone.
“It doesn’t seem like much. But when they hit 10, 20, 30 businesses a night and they steal 100 gallons out of each one, we are talking thousands of dollars.” said Wilson.
What’s next:
A source told FOX 29 police have identified one of the suspects and are looking to identify the second.
Arrests are expected in the coming days.